Weekend in Amsterdam

The day I met my wife, we ended up in a deep travel conversation where I said the words “I bet you haven’t been to Croatia”. Her reply: “I am going to Croatia in July”. Needless to say I convinced her to fall in love with me so that I could tag along on her Croatia trip!

Why am I talking about Croatia?

So it turns out Croatia is not an easy place to get to from Indiana (a common problem when your local airport is not a hub). My wife was tasked with figuring out the flights and she tasked me with figuring out the hotels. We decided to find cities that are easy to get to from the US that also had direct flights to Croatia. The solution was to bookend our six days in Croatia with a weekend in the Netherlands and a weekend in Sweden. So the first stop on our 3 country tour: Amsterdam!

How did we get there?

We found a flight from JFK to AMS on KLM and paid cash for the tickets. To get to JFK from IND we paid for one round trip ticket and used a companion pass that was a perk from the American Express Platinum Delta Card. One night in the Kimpton De Witt hotel was paid for with 50,000 IHG points.

Day One

We took an Uber from the airport to our hotel the Kimpton De Witt. We immediately noticed all the bicycles. I am convinced every citizen in the city is issued a bicycle at birth we saw so many. A quick walk from the hotel took us to a little cafe where we ate breakfast with a view of the Damrak and the Dancing Houses.

After breakfast we set off to tour the city. The best way to tour this city is by floating down the canals on a boat tour. There were a ton of tours to choose from. We wanted the ability to ask questions and something less crowded so we decided to pick one of the smaller boats.

After our canal cruise we kept exploring on foot. We walked over to Dam Square. Found a nice restaurant to eat dinner on one of the canals, then decided to walk over to the Red Light District. That turned out to be a mistake. We only planned to walk around just to see the area, however it seems thousands of other tourists had the same idea. We ended up in a mass of people slowly inching forward little by little with no way to turn off the street. My wife is claustrophobic so and started to freak out because we were trapped on this crowded street (a literal tourist trap!). When we finally escaped the crowd we decided to call it a night.

Day 2

The next day we found a little cafe for some coffee and sweets. My wife raves about European cappuccino and I had to get a little dutch castle cake. Afterwards I had to check out some art. My wife hates museums but I couldn’t not see dutch masterpieces so I compromised by subjecting her to just a single museum. I passed on the Van Gogh Museum in favour of the Rijksmuseum. After the museum we went in search for a souvenir for my wife. We stumbled upon a very ornate shopping mall called the Magna Plaza. Turns out this was a 100 year old former post office building that was later converted into a mall. We spent our last few hours in Amsterdam relaxing, eating, and drinking, then we headed out to the airport for our main destination: Croatia.